A very fair point. Maybe what I'm thinking of really would not help. My area is hospital-rich, with at least 7 hospitals within a 20 minute drive. One is pediatric, one is a level 1 trauma center, one is a stroke center, etc. Plus a burn center within about an hour.
During patient triage, I wanted the medic to scan the triage barcode and indicate the very basic info about the patient including transport destination. The triage officer has the other half of the tag and would scan his copy to find out where a patient went. I was hoping that it would be easier to answer questions regarding location of patients, particularly john/jane doe's.
I'm still not entirely sure whether I've understood how this will be put into practice, but here are a few key issues:
- You say that when the patient is being triaged, the medic triaging would also scan the barcode and then enter additional information into the device. This adds on significant time. Even a 10 second addition to a process that should only take 30 seconds adds up.
- When the patient is being triaged, their ultimate destination won't likely be known. This will be up to the Transport Officer. Nothing is easy at at MCI, but as long as everyone respects the Transport Officer's role then this patient destination tracking should be relatively straightforward.
- Will every agency who may be triaging patients (i.e. everyone with EMS resources anywhere in the region who might potentially respond to an MCI together) get on board with this? If not, it is useless.
- Even with agency phones, the lack of devices could make this ineffective. Let's say we have an MCI. The first crew arrives and one crew member takes the command role while the other begins to triage. Just after the first crew arrives, a second arrives. Both of these crew members begin to help with triage. This requires that this crew has been issued two phones. I suspect that many agencies would issue one phone per ambulance. So does one guy just need to sit out and wait for his two colleagues to finish triage? That is not effective use of resources.
- How will the issues of contamination be addressed? It doesn't seem practical to wipe down the phone between patients. Will touch screen devices even respond when being used by someone with medical gloves?
I commend you for trying, but I think your coding skills may better be spent elsewhere. I don't doubt that you can code something, and maybe even manage to sell it to a few agencies. But I just don't think that it would be truly beneficial in the field at this point.
